The Constitution created a national government of limited, enumerated powers. Over the years the Supreme Court dismantled many of the original barriers to expansive government. Now the President and the left-wing legal establishment are lobbying the Court to ratify the unprecedented power grab known as Obamacare.

America’s health care system is a mess. However, there were better options than a federal takeover through the misnamed Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act. Which is why a majority of Americans continue to oppose the law and support its repeal.

Moreover, Obamacare exceeded the federal government’s authority. States have what is known as “police power,” which allows them to regulate widely—such as requiring residents to purchase auto insurance. However, the national government has no such authority. Congress may act only on an explicit grant of power under Article 1, Section 8.

No provision authorizes Washington to dictate that Americans purchase a private product like health insurance. If the federal government can do that, it can do anything—that is, act like a state with “police power.” Hence Washington could force Americans to buy General Motors autos, Lehman Brothers securities, or a new home to boost the economy. Or, to use the famous hypothetical, force Americans to eat broccoli to reduce health care costs. In more than two centuries Congress has never claimed to possess such authority.

Admittedly, the idea of constitutional limits is not fashionable in Washington. The regulation of “interstate commerce” has become the all-purpose justification for almost everything Congress does. Interstate commerce once really meant interstate commerce. Now it means anything that vaguely sort of indirectly affects interstate commerce. Indeed, defenders of Obamacare argued that Uncle Sam can regulate individuals who have not acted, but simply engaged in “mental activity” by choosing not to enter interstate commerce, as one district court judge put it. It is an extraordinary claim.

Members of Congress rarely ask whether they have authority to act. When Obamacare was passed, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi seemed shocked by the question, responding “are you kidding?” Majority Whip James Clyburn (D-SC) acknowledged that “There’s nothing in the Constitution that says that the federal government has anything to do with most of the stuff we do.” Rep. Phil Hare (D-Ill.) told constituents: “I don’t worry about the Constitution.”

Nevertheless, the Left was confident, since the Court had rarely blocked new assertions of federal power. However, when even swing Justice Anthony Kennedy expressed doubt about the measure’s lawfulness during oral arguments in March, President Obama and his followers panicked.

The president warned that “an unelected group of people would somehow overturn a duly constituted and passed law,” that such a decision “would be an unprecedented, extraordinary step of overturning a law that was passed by a strong majority of a democratically elected Congress.” Yet the courts routinely void, often to liberal applause, duly enacted laws, including those banning sodomy, outlawing abortion, and mandating segregation, for instance. Indeed, Sen. Barack Obama advocated appointment of those who would uphold “the Court’s historic role as a check on the majoritarian impulses of the executive branch and the legislative branch.”

Sen. Chuck Schumer (D-NY) claimed that “Should the Supreme Court overturn this law, it would be so far out of the mainstream that the court would be the most activist in a century.” He apparently forgot decades of left-wing activism, stretching from the New Deal to the Great Society. A passel of leftish legal commentators also expressed shock, shock that conservative justices might not exercise “restraint.” Columbia’s Patricia Williams even argued that the Court’s very grant of certiori, or decision to take the case, was “an astonishing display of judicial activism.”

Since the New Deal the legal game played by the Left is simple. Use the activist judiciary to engage in social engineering. Then lecture more conservative justices to ratify these activist splurges in the name of judicial “restraint.” Government would only expand, never shrink.

Observed Michael McConnell, a Stanford law professor and former federal judge: “It appears the [liberal law] professors’ idea of sound jurisprudence is that their favored justices are free to invalidate statutes that offend their sensibilities whether or not the words of the Constitution have anything to say on the matter …. But if conservative justices have the temerity to enforce actual limits on government power stated in Article 1, Section 8—over liberal dissents—then they are acting as shameless partisans.” This position fits the old adage, heads I win, tails you lose.

The real issue is not activism versus restraint, but fidelity to the Constitution. Enforcing limits on government often require judges to act. As in the case of Obamacare.